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Thursday, April 16, 2015

In my upcoming show I'm including pottery made by my father, ceramic artist Kenyon Thomas. This has been such a learning experience for me. I have had a little glimpse into his world and the detail he puts into each individual piece of pottery has been quite a challenge to reproduce! I hope I've been able to capture the essence of his work in my still life.

In the above photos you can see my first impressions of the ginger jar's design, trying to get as symmetrical as possible but still off here and there by accident. I know once I get down to the real painting I can correct all the details. I'm repainting the blue with transparent paint to capture the luminosity of a cobalt glaze on porcelain. I discovered a wonderful Venetian medium that actually has bits of ground crystal glass in it and I used it in my blue with wonderful results.

Next I lay down my initial idea, roughed in but making sure placement is correct. You can see that my values are still lighter than the final vision so I can build my lights and darks with scumbles and glazes. There is not much modelling at this point.

And finally, the fun part, working on details and layering up my colors and values. Voila! the painting is complete!